No. 65

Getting Around Phnom Penh: After a grueling 32 hour travel day that involved four different airports and some mysterious airplane switching (“Why are we now getting on a plane that says Royal Bhutan Airways?”) we landed in Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia. We somehow didn’t realize that April is the hottest, driest, most humid month to be here and it immediately boiled us into a couple of limp Anglo-noodles. Still, we managed to sweat to some great oldies, mainly the city’s lovely collection of pagodas, palaces and Buddhist temples. In the process, we also discovered the most thrilling of public transport options – the Cambodian moto – wherein you flag down a guy on a motorcycle and jump on the back for a 50 cent speed-ride across town. Very difficult to photograph ourselves on one, but you can see others doing it above. It’s a cheap thrill and easy enough to balance both of us on the same bike, particularly after watching a family of four Cambodians do the same while also carrying some laundry and a color television. We’ve seen very few foreigners riding around this way which is a real tragedy because the drivers are usually fun and chatty, if not a little sweaty, and anyway Amy looks really hot when she’s riding sidesaddle like a local girl. We do attract a lot of pointing and laughing, but that’s nothing new.